Extended thoughts on CzechMate: In Search of Jiri Menzel and other musings.

 I was watching the recent mega-documentary of Jiri Menzel and the history of Czechoslovakian cinema and while its main primary focus was Menzel who still comes across as a shy old man though one that can still be classed as a bit of a dirty old man as noticed when he recounts that Milos Forman asked him "what pills are you taking?" and knowing exactly what was meant.

The figure that interested me most in this film was Jan Nemec however purely for the scene where he's cursing the "idiotic" films of his students. In a way it is inevitable for me to be drawn towards something like because I almost felt the same way as a student in a film class myself. All I could see was toilet humour in a mockumentary aspect and the other film that did get made was a preachy knock-off of the Saw series. All well and good and it shows definite Hollywood potential but for me it felt so hollow. My film had to be abandoned as a) I didn't conduct any meetings and b) nobody read the script until the day before. The whole process destroyed me because my film was such a difficult thing to write - a moody piece about one man's mental disintegration that he wants a meaningful relationship with his nurse. You add into the equation that man would have to be in his late 50s/early 60s and the nurse would have to be in her early to mid 20s and it was supposed to make you uncomfortable. It was supposed to be something like a mixture of David Cronenberg's Spider and Videodrome filtered through the prism of Samuel Beckett. In short, I was interested in making an arthouse film next to the Hollywood Hucksters!

I also wanted to make a documentary on Czechoslovakian cinema myself but more just using clips from films mixed with the Prague Spring and the famous ice hockey match from 1969 where the Czechs beat the Soviet Union. I never managed to finish it due to the program swallowing up the film snippets and demanding money from me that I didn't have and there was no way we could get around it so basically I was doomed into making no films bar an 8 minute video that took all the files that were on the computer and made a sort of brochure of the experience of being in that school over the couple of years. I've labelled it a fan-made video of Orbital's The Box Version 3 but it was half brochure/"Dublin in a Day" but I tried to make it like it was a drunk man's half-remembered memories of the day before and he got beaten up for making a pass at an attractive girl. There's no violence, it's just heavily implied and made to make you feel like that that's the case.

But to get back to the CzechMate documentary, given that most, if not all, of these directors have now passed away, it's a touching memorial and monument to these directors, for what they went through, and how they coped with the process. I also loved seeing the homes in which they lived. Menzel looked like he lived in a clean library with clean fake wood panelled floors and reams upon reams of books to meet the eye. Vera Chytilova surprisingly lived in what I would assume is a fairly normal house. It feels almost unassuming which given her films could be ostentatious and antagonistic, it almost feels weird. On the other hand, the more unsung and unheard of Drahomira Vihanova lived in a quaint little house in the middle of nowhere. 

It's a kind of funny reaction really that while I have no qualms about death itself, there is a sadness I feel with these directors passing because more and more, the personality that's needed in order to sustain filmmaking is slowly vanishing or even has vanished. I look at how the remake of Suspiria was marketed and it filled me with disgust. Personality, or the whole process of auteurship if you will, is a process that has been discarded even in the realms of arthouse cinema. It's like what Rivette said, these days all the newer filmmakers just end up making the same film by trying to be different rather than taking a common theme and putting their own spin on it. At least, with CzechMate, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur made a documentary that allowed every single player in the Czech New Wave and a few other directors from outside to tell their story and on their own terms.